This poem is a translation of the Mughal emperor and poet Bahadur Shah Zafar’s ghazals, ‘Lagta nahi hai dil mera’. As Bahadur Shah II (1775–1862), he was the last emperor of the Mughal dynasty, which was deposed in the aftermath of the Great Uprising against British colonial rule in 1857 and its bloody suppression the following year. Exiled to Rangoon, Burma (now Yangon, Myanmar), Bahadur Shah II was broken in spirit; his sons and grandsons had been murdered, his family scattered, and the glory of his dynasty reduced to ashes. In the circumstances, his nom de plume, Zafar (‘the victorious’ in Arabic) seems cruelly ironic; his late poems reflect the bleakness of his final years. For a sensitive and detailed contextual biography, see William Dalrymple, The Last Mughal: The Fall of a Dynasty, Delhi 1857 (London: Vintage, 2006).

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‘Risk’

The first two lines of this poem are adapted from observations made by the Perso-Arab geographer and cosmographer Abu Yahya Zakariya al-Qazvini (1203–1283) in his treatise, Kitab Aja’ib al-Makhluqat wa Gharaib al-Mawjudat (Wonders of Creation and Marvels of Existence), whose oldest extant manuscript is dated 1280. The third line of the poem has been adapted from the legend appended to a fifteenth-century compass map of the polar seas; the fourth line is culled from Job 28:14. My source for these extracts is a page in a chapter largely comprising quotations identified as ‘Fragments of Myth and Enlightenment’ in Christoph Ransmayr, The Terrors of Ice and Darkness (trans. John E. Woods; London: HarperCollins/Paladin, 1992), p. 134.

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‘As It Emptieth It Selfe’

This poem takes, as its point of departure, the note to the copper engraving of a map of Bengal and parts of Odisha and Bihar, prepared by John Thornton (1641–1708) and Samuel Thornton (fl. 1703–1739), official hydrographers to the East India Company. This map bears the following title, rendered here in its original grammar, spelling, and punctuation: ‘A Mapp of the Greate River Ganges. As It Emptieth It Selfe into the Bay of Bengalla.’

Several editions of this map were produced between 1685 and 1711, which has been published, with an extended note, in Vivek Nanda and Alexander Johnson, Cosmology to Cartography: A Cultural Journey of Indian Maps (New Delhi: National Museum & Hyderabad: Kalakriti Archives, n. d. [2015]), pp. 106–109.

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‘Lascar’

The italicized lines in the first strophe of this poem incorporate or adapt passages from Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes story, ‘The Man with the Twisted Lip’. See Conan Doyle, Sherlock Holmes: The Complete Novels and Stories, Volume I (New York: Bantam Classics, 1986), pp. 351–374.

The poem is woven around the colonial maritime history in which the ‘lascar’ (from the Persian root word laskhar, literally, ‘army’) was a key participant. It contains words for various ranks of sailor adapted into maritime English between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries from Arabic, Konkani, Marathi and Malay, such as ‘seacunny’ (Arabic: sukkan, rudder), ‘tindal’ (Marathi: tandel, helmsman), ‘syrang’ (Marathi: sarang, coxswain) and ‘topaze’ (origin uncertain). The lascars would most likely have referred to themselves as jahaazi (from the Arabic jahaaz, ‘ship’).